Natasha Lomas
Natasha is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining September 2012, based in Europe. She arrives after a stint reviewing smartphones for CNET UK and, prior to that, more than five years covering business technology for silicon.com (now folded into TechRepublic.com). At silicon she focused on mobile and wireless, telecoms & networking, and IT skills issues, and has also freelanced for organisations including The Guardian and the BBC. Natasha holds a First Class degree in English from Cambridge University, and an MA from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
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UK eyeing fines for social media content moderation failures
A UK minister has suggested the party is open to bringing in financial penalties or otherwise changing the law in order to encourage social media firms to improve their content moderation processes. Read More
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Could the UK be about to break end-to-end encryption?
Once again there are indications the UK government intends to use the law to lean on encryption. A report in The Sun this week quoted a Conservative minister saying that should the government be re-elected, which polls suggest it will, it will move quickly to compel social media firms to hand over decrypted data. Read More
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UK wants G7 to take collective action on online extremism
The UK Prime Minister is using the annual G7 summit of seven of the world’s major industrialized democracies to push for more to be done about online extremism, including co-ordinating on ways to force social media platforms to be more pro-active about removing and reporting extremist content to authorities. Read More
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Raspberry Pi Foundation and CoderDojo to code club together
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced it’s merging with another code club charity, Dublin-based CoderDojo. The aim is to advance shared goals around furthering the march of computing education for young people. Read More
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Gatwick Airport now has 2,000 beacons for indoor navigation
Complex indoor environments such as airports and shopping malls can be a nightmare to find your way around. And while Google is eyeing smartphones with 3D sensors as one potential fix for places GPS won’t accurately reach, another approach is to kit out an interior with lots of Bluetooth beacons — giving smartphone users located-locked pings to fix onto to know where they are. Read More
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SoftBank’s Nvidia stake is reportedly worth $4BN
Bloomberg is today reporting the size of SoftBank’s stake in Nvidia is $4 billion, for 4.9 per cent of the company, which it says would make it the fourth largest investor in the chipmaker. Read More
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Cera is building an AI for social care decision support
Can AI overhaul the social care system? That’s the pitch underpinning UK home care provider Cera’s plans. The startup has today taken the tiniest baby steps to launch an AI chatbot that it hopes will, at an unspecified point in future, be able to assist carers with recommendations for home care of people with conditions such as dementia. Read More
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Chinese trio carve up a quarter of global smartphone sales in Q1: Gartner
The global smartphone market grew 9.1 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to Gartner’s latest stats, and growth is being driven by a trio of Chinese device makers. Read More
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Apple and Nokia bury patent hatchet
Well that didn’t last long. A fresh patent spat between Nokia and Apple which fired up at the back end of last year when Cupertino accused the former world number one mobile maker of making like a patent troll appears to have been resolved already. Read More
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Apple Pay now supports higher value transactions at most UK contactless tills
If the UK’s £30 contactless payment limit was holding back greater adoption of Apple’s biometric contactless payment tech, Apple Pay, the company should expect to see uplift in usage as it believes that a majority of UK contactless POS now supports limitless transactions. Read More
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CornerJob bags $19M to keep growing its blue-collar hiring platform
Barcelona-based blue-collar recruitment app CornerJob has closed a $19 million Series C. The new financing will be used for product development, says CEO David Rodriguez, as well as bolstering its position in “strategic markets” and expanding into some new ones. Read More
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Facebook’s content moderation rules dubbed ‘alarming’ by child safety charity
The Guardian has published details of Facebook’s content moderation guidelines covering controversial issues such as violence, hate speech and self-harm culled from more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that the newspaper has seen. Read More
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Facebook fined $122M in Europe over misleading WhatsApp filing
Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of messaging app WhatsApp cost $19 billion when it was announced. Now the price tag has been bumped up a little more after European regulators slapped the company with a €110M (~$122M) fine for providing “incorrect or misleading” information at the time of the deal. Read More
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Google has an indoor positioning tech in the works, called VPS
Google has announced it’s working on a service to offer detailed indoor location positioning using its Tango 3D sensing computer vision tech. Read More
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Verse grabs $20.5M to take its p2p payments play beyond Europe
Social payments app Verse has closed a $20.5 million Series B round of funding from its existing investors. The round is led by Spark Capital, with eVentures and Greycroft Partners also participating. It raised its Series A in October last year, when it took in $8.3M. Read More
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“We should not talk about jobs being lost but people suffering,” says Kasparov on AI
How can humans stay ahead of an ever growing machine intelligence? “I think the challenge for us is to always be creative,” says former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, speaking on stage here at TechCrunch Disrupt New York. Read More
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After WannaCry, ex-NSA director defends agencies holding exploits
General Keith Alexander has warned there will be more ransomware attacks this year, and urged industry to work with government to try to defend against global cyber threats. Read More
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WannaCrypt raises questions over government cyber priorities
The fallout from the WannaCrypt ransomware attack which quickly spread to multiple countries and systems last Friday continues to cause consternation around the world. And raises questions over government cyber security priorities. Read More
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DeepMind NHS health data deal had ‘no lawful basis’
DeepMind’s inaugural data-sharing deal with the UK’s National Health Service looks to be coming firmly unstuck. Read More
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NuCypher is using proxy re-encryption to lift more enterprise big data into the cloud
After spending time at a London fintech accelerator last year, enterprise database startup ZeroDB scrapped its first business plan and mapped out a new one. By January this year it had a new name: NuCypher. It now will try to persuade enterprises to switch to their specialized encryption layer to enhance their ability to perform big data analytics by tapping into the cloud. Read More
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